I recently found the ‘finale’ for the TOONTOWN-sequence in WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, a part of a storyboard that HARALD SIEPERMANN and I created in the summer of 1987 in the AMBLIN-studio on the UNIVERSAL-lot. it was never used in the film, – since our boards summed up to about 15 min of film the director, BOB ZEMECKIS, cut the sequence down to 45 seconds.

FRANS MASEREEL, 1889 – 1972, was born in belgium and is probably the greatest woodcut artist of the twentieth century. his work belongs to the EXPRESSIONISTIC style, – THOMAS MANN, EMILE ZOLA and STEFAN ZWEIG were the writers whose novels MASEREEL illustrated. when I worked on the adaptation of the musical CATS as an animated feature film in 1991 I used MASEREEL’S work as look-reference. as well as a lot of art from numerous german expressionistic painters like, KAETHE KOLLWITZ, MAX PECHSTEIN, KARL SCHMIDT-ROTTLUFF and EMIL NOLDE. the story was supposed to take place in london during the second world war, the so called BLITZ ( from blitz-krieg ), so I referred to a lot of historic photographs of the destroyed london from that time.

below are some of my earliest designs for CATS, the ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER musical, produced by STEVEN SPIELBERG in his london AMBLIMATION studio, all ‘painted’ with tipp-ex white correction fluid on black cardboard. I touched up the pretty rough white strokes with black markers. I know, it sounds like a very unusual technique – but woodcut would have been worse.

in june 1987 I flew with HARALD SIEPERMANN to L.A. to do the storyboard for the TOONTOWN-sequence in WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. we stayed as far as I remember five weeks, worked in a trailer right behind the AMBLIN ‘WHILE YOU WAIT’ – building on the universal lot, and created probably a thousand or more sketches. the final sequence was about 15 min long, what was with changes cut down to 45 sec in the final film. I remember one of the first assignments we got from DON HAHN, the assoc.producer, was to create a walk of eddie valiant through a part of toontown. we had to come up with all different light situations. harald did the sketch, that I colored from memory below, I painted then in 1987 the whole pan without the character and ILM used the whole set-up to create the light effects and the combination with the actor BOB HOSKINS as a test.

some more from universal/amblimation dec.1995 released BALTO. an outlined bear in one color would have looked too cartoony, too much detail in the fur too expensive to animate, too realistic and it would have flickered. this is what I came up with as a solution, just animated highlights in two different colors. the last one is a color continuity sheet with changing light during the sunset. all felt pen and gouache on top of SIMON WELLS xeroxed storyboard drawings.

deep in some drawers I found accidentally a few xeroxed layouts from universal’s/amblin’s 1995 released BALTO. for some of them I had the corresponding reproduced BG’s. there is enough for another later post, here are the first 6 scenes. I added the artist’s name as far as I remember them…

ABOUT ME

my name is hans bacher, – I work as production designer in the animation film industry. for the last 40 years I lived and worked in duesseldorf, london, paris, los angeles, manila and tokyo. now I am professor for film-design at the nanyang techn. university in singapore.